We are here to provide an independent, rather skeptical view of events at Marquette University. Comments are enabled on most posts, but extended comments are welcome and can be e-mailed to jmcadams2@juno.com. E-mailed comments will be treated like Letters to the Editor.
This site has no official connection with Marquette University. Indeed, when University officials find out about it, they will doubtless want it shut down.

Marquette has touted a “123 page report” from the Faculty Hearing Committee to support its claim that we should be disciplined. Somehow, the fact that it’s a long report is supposed to mean it’s really good. The sensible people, in contrast, will suspect that anybody with a cogent argument doesn’t need to drone on for 123 pages.

Worse, the university tried to use the Faculty Hearing Committee report as an excuse to fire us, when in fact it only recommended we be suspended for one or two semesters.

Supreme Court Unimpressed

The Wisconsin Supreme Court was entirely unimpressed with the report of the Faculty Hearing Committee. One problem (and a damning one in the view of at least some justices) was that Prof. Lynn Turner had attacked us in an open letter signed by a few dozen leftist faculty. The Court found:

¶42 Under any reasonable standard of impartiality, Dr.
Turner would be disqualified. She publicly inserted herself
into the dispute and expressed a personal interest in its
outcome. And she did not just express her opinions on these
matters in passing—she committed herself to them in writing.
Having done so, she could not decide the FHC proceedings in
favor of Dr. McAdams without contradicting what she had already
said to the entire Marquette University campus. These are not
anonymous members of the public to whom she would be admitting
that her initial convictions were mistaken. They are her
professional colleagues and students. The natural human impulse
to resist acknowledging a mistake, especially in light of the
audience to whom she would be making the acknowledgement, is
sufficiently powerful to affect Dr. Turner’s consideration of
the dispute. If an arbitrator evidenced this level of bias, we
would set aside the resulting award. The FHC’s composition was
unacceptably compromised by Dr. Turner’s bias.

¶72 The defects inherent in the University’s alternative
analytical structure, however, represent just one of two
problems with its assessment. The second is that the University
conducted the analysis backwards. With the benefit of
hindsight, the University reverse-engineered its conclusion that
Dr. McAdams is a plainly unfit professor because of unknown
third parties’ reactions to his blog post. The blog post caused
“harm,” the University said, in the form of critical, sometimes
vile, sometimes violently-worded, responses sent to Instructor
Abbate after the story had received national attention. Its
“unfitness” analysis proceeded as follows: Instructor Abbate
suffered harm because she received offensive communications from
third parties; the communications were prompted by Dr. McAdams’
blog post (directly or indirectly); Dr. McAdams has a
responsibility not to harm his students; a professor is unfit to
serve if he violates his responsibilities to the University’s
students. Quod erat demonstrandum. But the University can
reach this conclusion only because its analysis traveled in
reverse. So quod non erat demonstrandum.

¶73 Performing the analysis in the correct direction leads
to the unavoidable conclusion that the blog post has nothing
relevant to say about Dr. McAdams’ fitness as a professor. The
University’s end point is where we start—that is, we consider
first whether the challenged extramural comment, on its face,
violated Dr. McAdams’ “responsibilities to . . . [the
University’s] students.” Although Instructor Abbate was
functioning as a University instructor, we will consider only
her status as a student for purposes of this analysis. The
University identified several aspects of the blog post that it
believes were problematic. For instance, it says Dr. McAdams
relied on improperly obtained information (the surreptitious
recording of the conversation between Instructor Abbate and the
student); he identified Instructor Abbate by name; he linked to
her contact information; he drafted the post in a way that would
subject Instructor Abbate to public contempt; and the post
contains factual errors.

¶74 The undisputed facts show that none of the aspects of
the blog post about which the University is concerned could have
violated Dr. McAdams’ responsibility to Instructor Abbate. The
FHC’s Report acknowledged that there is no prohibition against
naming a student in a blog post. Nor is it improper for a
faculty member to link to a student’s personal webpage, even
when that webpage lists the student’s contact information. The
Report acknowledged this is still true even when the blog post
is critical of the student. Nor do blogging faculty members
have a general obligation to ensure every statement they make in
a post is accurate.

Note that it sounds nice to say “professors should always be accurate.” But if any inaccuracy — even a trivial one — can be used as an excuse to fire a troublesome professor, academic freedom doesn’t mean much. Further, what is “accurate” is often a matter of opinion. Can a professor who expresses skepticism about man-made, catastrophic global warming be fired for being “inaccurate?” What about a professor who says that Donald Trump would not have been elected without the interference of the Russians?

But worse, nothing about our blog post was inaccurate.

¶76 Finally, there is the University’s assertion that Dr.
McAdams drafted the blog post in such a way that it would
subject Instructor Abbate to public contempt. The blog post is
certainly critical of her, so one could reasonably foresee that
it would engender critical responses. We do not understand the
University to argue that an extramural comment that causes such
responses is beyond the pale—an extraordinarily unusual
argument for an educational institution to make—so we perceive
its concern to be about the responses that go beyond the realm
of reasonable criticism. But the University did not identify
any aspect of what Dr. McAdams actually wrote to support its
charge. Instead, it used third-party responses to the blog post
as a proxy for its allegedly contempt-inducing nature. Here
again, the University demonstrates that reverse-engineering a
conclusion is not the most reliable method of conducting an
analysis. In this instance, the University caught itself up in
the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy. Just because vile
commentary followed the blog post does not mean the blog post
instigated or invited the vileness. The University must
identify which part of the blog post is supposed to have been
responsible for eliciting the offensive remarks. It did not
even attempt to do so. Our review of the blog post reveals that
it makes no ad hominem attack on Instructor Abbate, nor does it
invite readers to be uncivil to her, either explicitly or
implicitly. Because the University’s logical fallacy represents
the entirety of its assertion that Dr. McAdams wrote the blog
post to subject Instructor Abbate to contempt, we must reject
it.

The Supreme Court decision was a humiliating defeat for Marquette generally, and specifically for the Faculty Hearing Committee and President Michael Lovell.

Both the FHC and Lovell actually believed they could ignore Marquette’s contractual promise to faculty of free expression. The Faculty Statutes say:

“Dismissal will not be used to restrain faculty
members in their exercise of academic freedom or other rights
guaranteed them by the United States Constitution.”

What sort of arrogance on the part of Michael Lovell and mendacity on the part of the Faculty Hearing Committee made them think they could trample on that legally binding promise?

3 Comments:

In addition to being reinstated, it would seem that you should be entitled to millions in compensation for breach of contract. Lovell should also be fired for failure to do the job he was appointed to perform.

Dr McAdams, will you be disclosing the terms of the settlement with Marquette?

As an aside, I have two high schoolers who will shortly be looking for a university to attend. Marquette was on our list due to an alum who speaks highly of his time there. We removed Marquette from consideration due to Lovell's misconduct in your case (and in several other SJW-related actions).

Whether the terms will be known remains to be seen. As for removing Marquette from consideration: I can't blame you for that, but lots of places are as politically correct as Marquette, so be careful and look critically at each school. Have alums had good experiences? Yes, lots have, but in more recent years the political correctness has become more and more oppressive, especially if you are a conservative.